The Coming of the Greeksasia is in fact extremely limited. In 1972, while excavating a
Bronze Age cemetery near the town of Rimnikski, on the Sin-
tashta River in the Urals, Soviet archaeologists uncovered five
graves containing the decayed traces of vehicles that quite
clearly deserve to be called "chariots" (the vehicles had two
wheels, with ten spokes to the wheel). So far as chronology is
concerned, "a date before or around the middle of the second
millennium BC for the chariot-burials... would seem appro-
priate." 95 We have already noted the slightly earlier, although
less direct, evidence for "chariots" on the steppe: pairs of horse
skeletons found in the Timber Graves along the Lower Volga,
the graves dating to ca. 1700 B.C.
The only other evidence of any kind for early "chariots" in
the lands north of the Near East comes from the other end of
the horse-breeding koine: in Hungary and eastern Czechoslo-
vakia, Bronze Age graves have yielded pottery models of
spoked wheels, and the graves have been carbon dated to the
first half of the second millennium. That the modelers had
two-wheeled rather than four-wheeled vehicles in mind cannot
be proven, but unambiguous evidence for two-wheelers is not
far away. At Trebisov, in eastern Slovakia, a decorated pot
quite clearly shows four vehicles, each with two wheels (the
wheels having four spokes), and each drawn by a team of
horses. The pot came from a cremation grave dated shortly
after 1500 B.c.9<s
Although the evidence for "chariots" in the horse-breeding
koine is not quite so early as the cylinder seals from Kiiltepe,
it must be conceded that "chariots" made their appearance in
southern Russia and eastern Europe at about the same time that
they were being sought by kings in the Near East. In the
steppes above the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea there is evi-
dence that in the sixteenth century B.C. "chariot" teams were
- S. Piggott, "Bronze Age Chariot Burials in the Urals,"
a//;y 49(1975): 289. - Piggott, Earliest Wheeled Transport, 92—94.
IIO